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Last week I published a timeline of social business. The infographic shows range of different ways that technology and marketing are now strongly associated with the idea of "social". Is there a new kind of capitalism evolving here, one that is not solely driven by markets and market regulation but instead is more of a socialised milieu, something we are not entirely clear about, but which seems to stand somewhere between socialism and capitalism?

Over the twenty odd years from 1984 to 2007 we were barely able to ask that question. Those years represented a sense of completion, a sense that we had reached a historic high watermark for the capitalist ethos. It was about what to consume rather than what to make. This was cruise liner living.

To suggest that there might be flaws in this system was like suggesting now to bankers that they do not deserve a bailout.

As it turns out the flaws might well be down more to poor regulatory and political intervention than flaws that are integral to capitalism.

Regardless of that, a new type of economics has been evolving through those years. Even when the system as we now characterise it was apparently at a peak, a new one was burrowing away.

Is this a new adaptation to capitalism or is it a replacement, in effect a threat?

Long before the bank bailouts, academic business economist were talking about a need for flatter hierarchies. The command and control system of corporate management was already exposed as inefficient. Companies like Proctor and Gamble had been out looking for new ways to innovate for a decade before the crisis hit, by going outside their walls to find expertise and invention wherever they could.

Developments like open source software - people dedicating their time and energies to making sure that large software projects deliver on their objectives often for free - also pre-date the crisis by a decade.

And over the course of the decade from 2000 onwards social software allowed people to create content in competition with established media outlets, first through blogging and then through social networks.

For five years smart companies have been incorporating those social technologies into their basic enterprise operating system. Much of that activity is wholly unrelated to recession and its causes.

The popular term for these types of activities might actually be "socialization." We talk about socializing problems and challenges and even about the socialization of data.

This social capitalism is driven by collaboration and sharing, by the replacement of command and control by self-organising ecosystems of independent producers of software, apps and even components.

In fact in an important oversight we have tended to think of this system as distinctly software related whereas self-organising ecosystems have typified many physical product communities in areas like the Veneto region of Italy for decades.

If that is the production side, then on the consumption side we are fast moving towards a new type of market fragmentation where the end game lies in scaling a business while delivering to a market of 1.